Company-level profile of international coal trade: 1985-1990

This article profiles the 61 parent companies from 21 countries which, in 1990, were responsible for 88% of world coal exports. The profile categorizes the parent companies according to their principal business activity, establishes the extent to which their operations are transnational, identifies those with the fastest growing coal exports and investigates the relationship between exporting and profitability. Its main findings are that the majority of coal exports are produced by companies for which coal is not their main business activity, that half of the companies in the study are transnationals but only a quarter are transnational in coal and that, in the context of declining profit margins between 1985 and 1990, there is no evidence of a relationship between the profitability of a company's coal operations and its propensity to export